ab initio identification of human micrornas based on structure motifs从头开始识别人类小分子核糖核酸的基于结构图案.pdfVIP

BMC Bioinformatics BioMed Central Methodology article Open Access Ab initio identification of human microRNAs based on structure motifs Markus Brameier* and Carsten Wiuf Address: Bioinformatics Research Center (BiRC), University of Aarhus, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark Email: Markus Brameier* - brameier@birc.au.dk; Carsten Wiuf - wiuf@birc.au.dk * Corresponding author Published: 18 December 2007 Received: 18 July 2007 Accepted: 18 December 2007 BMC Bioinformatics 2007, 8:478 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-8-478 This article is available from: /1471-2105/8/478 © 2007 Brameier and Wiuf; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short, non-coding RNA molecules that are directly involved in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. The mature miRNA sequence binds to more or less specific target sites on the mRNA. Both their small size and sequence specificity make the detection of completely new miRNAs a challenging task. This cannot be based on sequence information alone, but requires structure information about the miRNA precursor. Unlike comparative genomics approaches, ab initio approaches are able to discover species-specific miRNA